consume my heart away
by tnun

Comment:


Never got my comments done. This was on my podium with equal silver medal. Or given the challenge topic, maybe equal bronze is better.
I'd have said something about the living experience it takes to distil this poem with such assurance. No country for callow youth. But I can't say that now because you'll think I'm just trimming my watchamajigger to suit the breeze, or some such mexed mitaphor. I admired your picture, gave it a 9, and a thank you.

following the stupid
by herfotoman

Comment:
This is the best photograph in the challenge. Not quite my highest score, because I can't make the connection to Byzantium. But that's very likely my problem, not yours. Anyway, it's a brilliant photograph; original and witty, and ultimately more entertaining than all of the other fifty-seven entries combined. 9. Thank you.


Message edited by author 2014-09-12 06:08:31.

Sailing to Byzantium
by rooum

Comment:
This is the most elegant photographic expression of the poem. It beautifully & effortlessly embraces Sailing to Byzantium’s themes of art-nature, mortality-immortality, and impermanence-transformation.

Yours is also the most economical and the most satisfyingly figurative of all the entries, especially as you have addressed the entire poem with your photograph rather than just an easily illustrated phrase wrenched callously out of its context.

Elegantly expressive, economical and figurative? Your photograph is itself a poem! That’s quite an achievement, but it makes you stand out a little awkwardly among so much leadenly literal stuff that appears to have been intended to demonstrate indifference to Yeats’s poem. Or to any poem.

Your beautiful photograph is my top pick. 10. And thank you.



Message edited by author 2014-09-12 06:08:06.

Low-Down
by RKT

Comment:
Nobody does rides better. I've always said that. There, I've said it again.

words
by jmritz

Comment:
Oh, bullshit! This is a preposterous placing. Look, it's true that you do submit some pretty radical stuff that eludes the imaginative reach of the average viewer. But this ought to be accessible to even the most resolutely average viewer.

Let's name names. Blue is Paul, who's a lovely guy and a hugely skilful photographer, but it's not a work of any consequence and certainly not his best stuff; looks like an advertisement for tampons. Red is Sara, about whom I know nothing; it's a stock shot fit for a greeting card intended for a recipient of whom the giver isn't especially fond. Yellow is John, and it's got his customary charm and atmosphere, and a garlic-whiff (or Gallic whiff) of street theatre; far the best of those three. There follows in the top ten (with just one exception) some images distinguished only by their lack of distinction. Original only in their spectacular avoidance of even trace levels of originality.

And then there's this, crouching in third-to-last place.

I simply can't imagine how anyone with any passion for photographs, anyone with even a touch of curiosity or a tiny flicker of imagination, could possibly subscribe to such a topsy-turvy view of the relative merits of the two ends of that spectrum.

This photograph demands attention. It seizes by the short hairs. It obliges the viewer to open it up and read the first chapter, right there in the store. It's a brilliant page-turner and I couldn't put it down. Thank you.

to the river
by whiteroom

Comment:
take me to the river

ambigua
by skewsme

Comment:
Too good. Far, far too good to be seen. I was not able to vote not even view the entries. Then when I saw the ribbons I was deeply grateful for having been elsewhere. Then when I saw this I was restored. Thank you.

when the west wind moves
by ubique

Comment:

Originally posted by skewsme: how do their antlers decide to curve like that? really like the composition with the two in the foreground and the other longhorn-looking animals in the distance.

Not antlers but horns; these are mature male impala antelopes. The horns take on this lovely compound curve, rather like a lyre when viewed from front-on, beginning in their second year. The 'longhorn-looking animals' are wildebeest, also called gnu though rarely locally. They're antelopes too.

P U L L
by insteps

Comment:
Who was that masked man?

still life 1
by daisydavid

Comment:
I guessed who's coming to dinner. Simply irresistible, thank you.